Rockets drop second home game to Dallas

Mavericks tie series at 2-2

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 1, 2005

These are the days that haunt at night, the kind that keep players awake until they are tormented in their sleep.

These are the ones they never forget.

The Rockets were there again, right where they were Thursday, leading by the same score. For a second consecutive fourth quarter, a game, a series and perhaps the season were on the line. And for the second consecutive game, the Rockets gagged up a game — and perhaps a series and season.

The Rockets did not just blow another fourth-quarter lead to lose to the Dallas Mavericks 97-93 on Saturday at Toyota Center, evening their best-of-seven playoff series at 2-2. They lost with another late collapse full of bad breaks and worse plays.

"We were awful, awful in the last six minutes," Rockets guard David Wesley said. "The last two games we were at 88-82 and just completely off offensively. We haven't put the ball in the basket. Bad possessions. Turnovers.

"A 20-0 run (Thursday) and a 15-5 run at the end of the game (Saturday). If it's panic or whatever it is, we didn't execute. We were awful finishing this game tonight the way we finished Game 3. Awful."

There were loose balls that bounced awry and calls that confounded and frustrated. But leading by six points with 5:40 to play, the Rockets went nearly five minutes without scoring while Dallas was more poised and precise down the stretch.

"Basically, these last two games are coming down to who executes, who does a great job of defending, who takes care of the ball and who wants it more," McGrady said. "And right now, those guys want it more than us. They're doing a great job of coming down, getting great shots, having us panic on the offensive end. Right now, it's really hurting us — 88-82 again. I can't believe it."

The breakdown began with missed shots. McGrady missed from 19 feet. Mike James missed an open 3. The Rockets ran an inbounds play to beat the shot clock, and ran it perfectly, but James missed from 18 feet.

Point guard Jason Terry, who had a team-high 32 points for the Mavericks, drained a 3-pointer to cut the Rockets' lead to three points.

On the next two possessions, the Rockets began to crack. Jon Barry went one-on-one on Dirk Nowitzki and tried a fadeaway over the Mavericks' 7-foot forward, missing from 17 feet. McGrady ran a pick-and-roll only to have his pass slip through Yao Ming's hands as he cut alone toward the basket.

Mavericks center Erick Dampier put in an offensive rebound for his only points of the night. Michael Finley hit a jumper for an 89-88 Dallas lead and, after McGrady missed, Finley drained another jumper, giving the Mavericks a 9-0 run and a 91-88 lead with a minute left.

Nightmarish sequence

With that, the Rockets were hit by the moments they will see in their sleep until Monday's Game 5, and unless they turn the series around, for much longer.

After Yao made a pair of free throws to cut the lead to one with 48.6 seconds left, McGrady smacked the ball out of Terry's hands at the other end of the court.

Ryan Bowen reached for the loose ball, but instead it sailed free. Nowitzki grabbed it and passed to Terry for the 3-pointer that turned a turnover into a trey and a four-point Dallas lead with 26.9 seconds left.

"I had it, and I ended up hitting it up in the air," Bowen said. "I felt I was just getting ready to grab it. If I do anything else, hit it down, do anything but what we did, we probably get that ball."

Wesley nailed a corner 3, the Rockets' first field goal in 5:20, to pull them to within a point with 19.3 seconds left. But twice with their hands on the ball, the Rockets came up empty.

"If he's one foot over, it's our ball," Padgett said. "It went straight down and popped up and I got it. But it hit out of bounds."

No Game 2 redux

Moments later, after the Rockets sent Stackhouse to the line to stop the clock, he made his first free throw, putting the Mavs ahead by two points, but he missed his second attempt, returning the Rockets to almost precisely the situation that set up McGrady to hit the Game 2 clincher.

McGrady had taken the ball with 10.4 seconds left and Game 2 tied Monday night. He grabbed the rebound of Stackhouse's miss with 11.4 seconds left Saturday.

But Josh Howard smacked the ball loose and out of bounds off McGrady for a turnover that ended the Rockets last chance.

Asked if he thought the ball was off him, McGrady said, "No, not at all. Not at all.

"Man it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. All I was thinking was we were in another situation where we weren't going to call a timeout and push the ball up and try to get the best shot. But that call, it was just heartbreaking."

But it wasn't just a call, or a bounce, or a shot. It wasn't even just one fourth-quarter collapse.

It was two games lost down the stretch, sending the series back to Dallas tied, but with one team aching.

Rockets summary

Quick thinking

Josh Howard would like to tell you he had it planned all along, that it was the product of a complicated drawing of X's and O's.

Jerry Stackhouse had missed the back end of a pair of free throws with 12.5 seconds to play and, for just a split-second, the crowd of 18,211 and Tracy McGrady thought the Rockets' had one last chance in T-Mac's hands.

That is, until Howard came from behind on the rebound, popped the ball up, and it bounced off McGrady's hand and arm, going out of bounds with 11.4 seconds left.

If it wasn't the play that won the game, it at least saved the Mavericks from any more of McGrady's last-second miracles.

"It was just me being sneaky," Howard said. "Coming around taking a chance. I poked it out. He tried to reach back for it, and it went out on him. It's just something I do."

What are the odds? If he tried the play 10 times, how many would succeed?

"Probably just that one," Howard said. "I think he took his eye off it. He probably wasn't expecting me to be coming. One in 10. It was meant to be for some strange reason."

My dinner with Yao

Rockets center
Yao Ming
spent Friday night with Mavericks assistant coach
Del Harris
, but the way they looked at it, the dinner was a reunion of the Chinese national team center and his former coach.

"That's the great thing about basketball and sports," Harris said. "This man is from China. I'm from the United States. We're going against each other in a do-or-die series. But our relationship through basketball transcends nationalities, transcends NBA franchises. We became lifetime friends in 2 1/2 months this summer.

"It was such a great evening. I recommend Yao's restaurant to anybody. That was such a tremendous meal we had, and my kids called me today just talking about it. It has P.F. Chang beat badly. He was such a good host. I had my two kids and their spouses. They had not met Yao so one never knows how the conversation might flow. We were there 2 1/2 hours. There was never a dead moment."

The subject of the first-round series between the teams did not come up.

"It was a great time for me," Yao said. "We (did) not talk about our game, but we still had a lot to talk about, and we enjoyed dinner. He gave us everything he can give in the Olympics for our team. For his age in that situation, that's really hard. He did a lot of jobs, the scouting report, the videotape. He did everything."

Game 6 tickets

The Rockets expect about 500 tickets for Thursday's Game 6 to be available at 9 a.m. today at 713-626-3865. They could only estimate available tickets because they were available through the night.

Press row view

Another game like this, and the fat bear is going to have to change his name. The Rockets might not be as young and swift as the Mavericks. They knew that. But with the past two games theirs to win, the league's oldest, most experienced team is supposed to run plays with poise and precision. Shots might miss. But if it's close, it should be theirs.

The Rockets should know better than they've showed the past two games.

By the numbers

4
— Wins by the road team, marking the fifth time in playoff history that road teams have won the first four games of a series.

6 — Jason Terry's 3-pointers, a Mavericks playoff record.

5 —Yao Ming's blocked shots, a career playoff high.

20 — Ties or lead changes, most in the series.

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The winning team has been outrebounded in every game of the series, a particularly odd twist with the Rockets 40-7 and the Mavericks 33-3 when outrebounding opponents in the regular season.